Abstract
MR. PALIN ELDERTON in a recent lecture to the Faculty of Actuaries (Trans. Fac. Act., 14, 1932, pp. 1-20) gave an interesting sketch of the life of his distinguished predecessor William Morgan, who became assistant actuary of the Equitable in 1774, actuary a year later, and retired so long after as 1830. Morgan, who was a self-taught mathematician, owed his appointment to the famous Dr. Richard Price, whose biography he wrote (not, according to Mr. Elderton, very well), and although some of his mathematical work in connexion with joint survivorships might not have commended itself to better trained mathematicians, it was, writes Mr. Elderton, the first serious attempt to obtain a general solution to the problems of survivorship, and had the merit a great one indeed of giving expressions that could be used to obtain arithmetical results from any mortality table.
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William Morgan. Nature 130, 56 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130056a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130056a0